pigeonburger
9hr ago
While I agree with you on most of your scenarios that there should be repercussions, there is a distinction between crime and legal repercussions (which could be civil lawsuits).
pigeonburger
9hr ago
So even if you increase the number of law enforcement in the field to a stratospheric number, that still doesn't mean they have to do jack all.
Yeah, but what we're talking here is an hypothetical scenario where we were addressing the fact that they don't have to do anything. My point was that the gun control side doesn't want to get into this discussion because discussing this gets to close to discussing how even if they were forced to defend the population, you'd need even more police than in the worst police states for them to actually be close enough to stop most violent crimes in time.
pigeonburger
10hr ago
I imagine it's not a conversation they enjoy, since inevitably it would force them to address the fact that unless we increase the amount of cops by orders of magnitude, they simply cannot be there to protect people in many or most cases. Not that their policy choice cannot be defended despite this, after all the optimal number of children drowning in pools is not zero. But the gun control side puts a lot of effort in thinking around this, as it feels wrong in a primal way, especially for men (and blue tribe men are still men, they do feel the macho impulse to be providers and protectors), that they are not trusted with the tools to defend their family or themselves and need to rely on people who are not likely to be present when it counts. It's not great to have to go and acknowledge "Yeah, some people are going to die helpless without means to defend themselves, but such is the price of safety", the same way the opposite side doesn't enjoy acknowledging that "some people are going to get shot with guns being legal but such is the price of freedom and self-reliance".
The main argument is that the simplicity of UBI (are you a citizen? do you have a pulse? congrats, here's your check!) compared to the complex mesh of benefits that make current safety nets makes for a flatter administrative landscape that leaves less cover for corruption and grift to hide in.
Not that it makes much of a difference when government is indifferent to it, as can be attested with how brazen the examples of Somali fraud we've seen recently were. But at least, if the government cares, in the case of UBI avoiding corruption and grift would be easier, as there's really only three ways one could abuse it: claim to be a citizen if they aren't, claim someone is alive when they aren't, claim they haven't recieved the money when they have.
pigeonburger
1d ago
Liberty is important!
Anglo Canada's founding stock is specifically selected for people who don't think so.
pigeonburger
1d ago
Yep, the advice I'd give a teen who wants a comfortable life now is about 180 opposed to what was the default when I was teen; move as far as you can stomach to large cities and go into trades instead of higher education. Or if you want to set yourself up, work in a trade in the city while living a frugal lifestyle for 5 years and get yourself a sizeable downpayment for a house in a rural area.
It's funny because anyone who answered not sure or no to the first one should be disqualified in having an opinion about the whole thing to begin with; it's a question with an answer about as close to an objective factual answer in military and geopolitical terms (which of course is yes), as it's one of the boundaries of the crucial GIUK gap, control of which limits Russian access to the Atlantic. If someone doesn't think it's strategically important to deny Russian warships access to the Atlantic, then I really wonder WHAT they consider strategically important!
3rd question is missing important context (instead of purchasing it? if purchasing it fails? if Russia or China gain influence or control of part of the island?)
4th question is doing the opposite, it's typical media bullshit of using the poll as diffusion of information rather than measurement, the pollster is more interested in telling people that the US is allowed to build military bases on Greenland by an existing agreement than taking proper measure of public sentiment.
I'm also baffled by the 3% who don't think it's strategically important, but aren't sure the US shouldn't build more bases there.
Not that, as the majority of people failing on the first question shows, public sentiment on it can be expected to be very sophisticated.
pigeonburger
2d ago
France should give Poland security guarantees
Historically that has worked out so well for Poland in deterring invasion. And for France, for that matter.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Maybe F1 The Movie, heard some noise about that one.
pigeonburger
7d ago
It's not exactly multiplayer in that sense, but I suggest taking a look at Death Stranding. The game's main theme is how cooperation is better than isolation, and the gameplay is tuned to deliver that message. When you first enter a region, the game forces you through a painful slog with pretty much no help from other players. Then slowly as you do deliveries for NPCs in the area the game allows more and more player built infrastructure in your game. When you use someone's infrastructure you can spam "likes" on it, which the creator of the infrastructure might see; those do essentially nothing (not completely but pretty much) except convey your gratitude. Eventually, you'll find yourself building roads or zipline networks through regions you don't have to stay in anymore because you just want to be helpful.
pigeonburger
8d ago
In West, we seem to be much more capable of keeping large protests under control without too much violence and death.
There's a difference in how existential for the regime protests are in regions like that vs in countries that have been stable for over a century are.
In the West, even a riot is mostly just the population trying to convince the government it's totes mad enough to take to the streets. Look at Jan 6th, even if they take one of the seats of government they just don't know what to do with it, they end up taking a tour of the place, it's cute. For many/most governments in the middle east, latin america, africa, even eastern europe, rioting is within living memory how your or your neighboring country's government got the job, so it's taken a bit more seriously. If a middle eastern riot takes its capitol, you can expect a lot worse than stealing a pedestal.
What makes it true or not is how healthy the competition and the market is. A company that only did this to extract more money from each sale would find itself having a hard time finding buyers compared to cheaper competitors. Companies that offer a genuinely good deal don't do it from the goodness of their heart, they do it because it's also a valid business strategy to aim at making a larger number of sales with a lower profit margin.
The issue with price discrimination is that instead of both parties capturing some excess value from the trade, one party captures almost all the excess value, while the other captures epsilon (as in, just enough to make the trade worthwhile, but no more).
In the case of "signaling" addons, it's quite possible that both the car manufacturer and the customer are happier with price discrimination. After all, the point of signaling is that you're showing everyone you paid for something expensive because you have money. If it was cheaper, or if it was available on every trim, that exclusive paint color or colored stitching the rich person paid for wouldn't be useful to signal how rich he is.
Yes, that's the plan. I'm planning on moving to a city next to a paddleable river this year, I want to practice in that river this summer, and then in autumn do a weekend trip not necessarily a trip down a river where I'd camp along the way, I'm also looking at campgrounds next to scenic paddleable lakes for daytrips.
pigeonburger
10d ago
I'm currently looking to get into canoeing as a hobby, inspired by tales and aesthetics of it from preceding eras, and I'm very afraid that I'm about to arrive into a hobby that had all the discovery and enjoyment (for me) optimized out of it. People are already reporting that national parks have to be reserved at the opening of the season if you want to have a chance to get a camping spot. My plan to avoid this is to use my contrarian superpower to look for under-optimised strategies. Everyone's reflex when it comes to these things is to go to national parks, maybe I should look at private camp grounds? Or at hunting/fishing lands, which do regulate the recreational use in a different scheme than national parks.
pigeonburger
10d ago
The steelman of price discrimination is that it enables a lower floor to a product's price than if it had to offer a single price point, which helps accessibility. It can even be good, in that the people who overpay for a few extras (especially for stuff like "color stitching" on seats or other visual upgrades which are pretty much just signaling that they could afford to pay for a fancy trim) are subsidizing the product for the people who get the cheaper ones. That if you made it illegal and that all cars had to have only one trim, it'd be a middle trim, it'd be more expensive than the current middle trim and the people who could only afford the base trim now just can't buy it anymore.
pigeonburger
12d ago
He's not actually saying anything about invading allies, what happens is that he mentions he'd like something that's a long shot, journalists jump to ask "is a military intervention ruled out?" and then he (or a surrogate) answers "nothing is ruled out" because the administration doesn't want to play or discard cards in their hand because of some jackass journalists. And the circus of "he's planning to invade an ally!" starts.
pigeonburger
12d ago
and the EU seems to be taking it seriously.
I don't think that means anything. There's political capital to win for western politicians in being the one who's most against or opposite Trump, and that's easier if you interpret everything he says in the least charitable, most unhinged way. We saw the same here in Canada, a certain defeat for the liberals was flipped by the media acting like Trump is seriously planning to invade.
pigeonburger
13d ago
My guess is that it's good a place as any. Wokeness, in its racial form, is in large part what we call "white guilt", which requires whiteness, which Minnesotans have, probably more than any other group. The kind of metastasized prosocial niceness that even if someone else does something bad right in your face you'd find a reason to excuse it and blame yourself for it. It also requires fairly recent multiracialism as over more than a couple of generations, white people tend to see that other races' successes and failures hinge on more complex factors than "white people".
pigeonburger
14d ago
I don't think you're not getting it, we just have a different gaming profile. The progression is frustrating and randomised, but personally I just put out of my mind. All it does is inform which buildings I'm likely to target for looting in a run but other than that I'm happy just getting random stuff and shooting ARC. I don't hate the looking through trash aspect. And the shooting is satisfying to me.
I'll grant that the out of run inventory management is annoying and especially coupled with the slow progression. I'm filling up with materials to build stuff I just don't have the blueprints or levels to build; and there's little use in building a bunch of entry level equipment, you'll always be able to build them right before a run.
It's not game of the year, but it's the low time and mental commitment that makes it so I keep coming back for a handful of runs a day.
pigeonburger
14d ago
It's not a competitive shooter, it's an extraction shooter, like Tarkov. That means sometimes you'll end up in a fight with other players, but in my experience the ARC Raiders playerbase is quite chill, at least when I play solo. 95% are not going to initiate PvP, most are happy just saving someone's ass for the fun of it. The PvE enemies are overwhelming but also previsible which makes them fun to plink at. The biggest issue I would say the game has is that it's repetitive and has a hard time keeping me occupied for more than an hour or so at a time.
pigeonburger
14d ago
I keep putting hours into ARC Raiders. It's low commitment to just go do a run or two. I also keep playing Marvel Cosmic Invasion, which was phenomenal at start but later on in the game it starts piling up more frustrating enemies. I don't know how I feel about that.
pigeonburger
15d ago
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't think that guy exists. But one can position themselves as him until he gets elected and the media shrieks at him constantly anyway.
So hypothetically, if I think the President is giving illegal orders to the military, or might, it’s out of bounds to say that to soldiers?
If you think so, you point to which orders you mean. Also, it's probably not up to a partisan politician to point it out, but to military instructors to explain it.
Something like “a soldier’s duty to disobey illegal orders is extremely serious and can have extremely serious consequences don’t fuck around with it as part of your political posturing.”
Pretty much. The military relies on obedience from soldiers except in the case of grossly illegal orders. "Don't execute illegal orders" is not for complicated matters that requires judges and courtrooms to parse, let alone those thorny enough that they often end up at the Supreme Court level, it's for obvious "I order you to set these unarmed civilians on fire" stuff. If those senators had any examples of those they should have been able to point them out. Otherwise, they're just messing up the chain of command by encouraging grunts to apply discretion to stuff that's way, way, way above their station to decide.
pigeonburger
15d ago
There's also some less committed Republicans who could be driven to exhaustion by the constant "everything Trump does is unprecedented and threatens the republic if not the entire planet" background messaging of the media. Positionning yourself as the guy that will still be a Republican but won't have the media shriek constantly about is good if you feel that these people outnumber Trump-only (or Trump-approved-only) voters.
The gun control side doesn't want to discuss self-defense and protection, it's not a productive topic for their side. Having to rely on the police for your protection is something they want to steer the conversation away from, because even if you did neuter the anti control argument that the police don't have to protect by making it that yes the police does have to protect people, they are still not likely to be present when it matters, and neutering that argument is not really possible.
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